As wireless communication systems evolve, wireless system design has become increasingly demanding in relation to equipment and performance requirements. Future wireless systems, which will be third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) systems compared to the first generation (1G) analog and second generation (2G) digital systems currently in use, will be required to provide high quality high transmission rate data services in addition to high quality voice services. Concurrent with the system service performance requirements will be equipment design constraints, which will strongly impact the design of mobile terminals. The 3G and 4G wireless mobile terminals will be required to be smaller, lighter, more power-efficient units that are also capable of providing the sophisticated voice and data services required of these future wireless systems.
Time-varying multi-path fading is an effect in wireless systems whereby a transmitted signal propagates along multiple paths to a receiver causing fading of the received signal due to the constructive and destructive summing of the signals at the receiver. Several methods are known for overcoming the effects of multi-path fading, such as time interleaving with error correction coding, implementing frequency diversity by utilizing spread spectrum techniques, or transmitter power control techniques. Each of these techniques, however, has drawbacks in regard to use for 3G and 4G wireless systems. Time interleaving may introduce unnecessary delay, spread spectrum techniques may require large bandwidth allocation to overcome a large coherence bandwidth, and power control techniques may require higher transmitter power than is desirable for sophisticated receiver-to-transmitter feedback techniques that increase mobile terminal complexity. All of these drawbacks have negative impact on achieving the desired characteristics for third and fourth generation mobile terminals.
Antenna diversity is another technique for overcoming the effects of multi-path fading in wireless systems. In transmit diversity, a signal is multiplexed and processed to generate a number of separate signals that are then transmitted via two or more physically separated antennas. Similarly, in reception diversity, two or more physically separated antennas are used to receive a signal, which is then processed through combining and switching to generate a received signal. Various systems, known as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, employ both transmit diversity and reception diversity, and provide multiplexing and diversity gains in wireless communication.
For narrow band MIMO channels, the diversity gain can be achieved via space-time coding and/or feeding back, to the transmitter, channel state information for use in preceding signals transmitted via the transmit antennas. Exploiting the channel state information at the transmitter can not only achieve diversity gain but also array gain. Typically, such a precoding technique requires the transmitter to have or otherwise acquire accurate channel state information. In many practical implementations, however, the transmitter cannot obtain very accurate channel state information. Thus, techniques have been developed whereby the receiver provides channel state information to the transmitter. In many cases, such as frequency division multiplexed (FDM) systems, there is no reciprocity between forward and reverse channels. Accordingly, a feedback channel with a limited transmission rate is typically provided between the transmitter and receiver so that the receiver can provide the transmitter with the channel state information.
In one precoding technique using channel state information to achieve diversity gain and array gain, the transmitter and receiver share a codebook that includes a number of codewords comprising matrices. In this regard, the matrices can each represent a different possible quantization of the MIMO channel, such as for a partial-spatial-rate case where the number of spatially multiplexed data streams to be transmitted is less than the number of transmit antennas. In various instances, the codebook is a set of subspaces rather than a set of matrixes, and as such, the codebook construction can be considered equivalent to subspace packing in a collection of vector subspaces of a vector space, such as a Grassmann manifold. In operation, the receiver quantizes the MIMO channel across which the transmitter and receiver are communicating, and locates the closest matching codeword. Advantageously, and limiting the number of bits of feedback to the transmitter, the receiver then conveys the codebook index of that codeword to the transmitter. Accordingly, the transmitter can use the index and its codebook to similarly locate the respective codeword, and then weight signals based upon the codeword for transmission to the receiver via the transmit antennas.
There are a number of different criteria that the receiver can use to locate the closest matching matrix including, for example, MSE (mean square error), capacity, minimum distance and the like. Typically, the receiver must perform an exhaustive search of the codebook for different criteria. As the size of the codebook increases, however, the computation complexity of locating the desired matrix also undesirably increases. It would therefore be desirable to design a system and method for reducing the computational complexity of locating a desired codeword.
Further, as codebooks are typically designed for the partial-spatial-rate case, it would also be desirable for the system and method to be configured for the full-spatial-rate case where the number of spatially multiplexed data streams to be transmitted equals the number of transmit antennas. Such a configuration would desirably operate without increasing (or significantly increasing) the number of feedback bits required to notify the transmitter of a desired codeword. In this regard, the partial-rate case is typically applicable for cases where the transmitter and receiver are communicating with a low to medium signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), typically far away from one another. If the transmitter and receiver are communicating with a high SNR, however, it is typically desirable to fully capitalize on the higher quality channel to maximize the throughput on the channel by increasing the number of spatially multiplexed data streams to equal the number of transmit antennas.